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Manual Spring 2014

Lorem Ipsum

Manual

224 Benefit Street
Providence, Rl 02903
United States
Manual@risd.edu
risdmuseum.org

Issue — 2 / Spring 2014 / Lorem Ipsum

RISD Museum director: John Smith

Manual Editor-in-chief: Sarah Ganz Blythe

with S. Hollis Mickey

Editor: Amy Pickworth

Graphic designers: Derek Schusterbauer

and Colin Frazer

Photography: Erik Gould

(unless otherwise noted)

Printer: Meridian

Special thanks to Denise Bastien, Gina
Borromeo, Laurie Brewer, Alison W. Chang,
Erik Gould, Sionan Guenther, Jan Howard,
Kate Irvin, Dominic Molon, Maureen C.
O’Brien, Emily Peters, Alexandra Poterack,
Glenn Stinson, and Elizabeth A. Williams.

Manual: a journal about art and its making
(ISSN 2329-9193) is produced twice yearly
by the RISD Museum.

Contents © 2014 Museum of Art,

Rhode Island School of Design

Manual is mailed to RISD Museum
members at the Friend and
Radeke Circle levels. It is also available
for sale in RISD WORKS and online at
risdworks.com.

(back cover)

Richard Artschwager
American, 1923-2013
Exclamation Point, 1980
Wood and latex paint
68.6 x 15.2 cm. (27 x 6 in.)

Georgianna Sayles Aldrich Fund
and Walter H. Kimball Fund 82.180
© 2014 Richard Artschwager /

Artists Rights Society CARS), New York

I

(end papers, left-right) n>

Ceramic wall tile, early 14th century
Molded fritware
31.8 x 31.8 cm. (12 y 2 x 1214 in.)

Gift of Mrs. Gustav Radeke 14.089

British

Untitled (Working Men’s Educational Union
textile length, “Jurassic Fauna & Cretaceous”),
1850-1860

Cotton plain weave, printed
90.2 x 118.7 cm. (35 J4 x 46 % in.)

Mary B. Jackson Fund 2013.18.2

Hans Sebald Beham

German, 1500-1550

Genius with the Alphabet, 1542

Engraving on paper

Plate: 4.5 x 7.9 cm. (1 13 /ie x 3 Vs in.)

Gift of Mr. Henry D. Sharpe 46.524

Issue

Manual Spring 2014

Lorem Ipsum

Contributors

James Allen is the Wilbour Professor of Egyptology
at Brown University. His research interests include
ancient Egyptian grammar and literature, religion,
and history.

Alison W. Chang is the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial
Fellow in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and
Photographs at the RISD Museum. She recently
curated Historias: Latin American Works on Paper
at the museum and is currently working on a circus-
themed exhibition, set to open in August 2014.

Kenneth Goldsmith (RISD BFA 1984, Sculpture)
is a poet living in New York City. He teaches
writing at the University of Pennsylvania and is the
founding editor of UbuWeb (ubu.com). In 2013, he
was named the first poet laureate of the Museum
of Modern Art.

Daniel Harkett (RISD faculty, HAVC) has published
essays on Jacques-Louis David's exhibition practice,
Louis Daguerre's Diorama, and human display in
the context of a giraffe craze. He is working on a
book on the visual culture of sociability in post-
revolutionary Paris.

Cyrus Highsmith (RISD BFA 1997, Graphic Design;
RISD faculty, Graphic Design) is a type designer and
graphic artist based in Providence, Rhode Island.
Eye magazine called Highsmith “one of the truly
original new voices in American type design.”

Jan Howard is the RISD Museum’s curatorial chair
and curator of prints, drawings, and photographs.
Her work focuses on modern and contemporary
art; her most recent project was America in View:
Landscape Photography 1865 to Now (2012).

Kate Irvin is the head of the RISD Museum's
Department of Costume and Textiles. Her recent
exhibitions range from men's fashion to Islamic
clothing and Chinese Taoist robes. With Laurie
Brewer, she authored Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of
Fashion (Yale, 2013).

Artist and designer Antoine Revoy (RISD BFA 1999,
FAV) is a critic in the Illustration Department at
RISD. Raised in Japan, he lives and works in New
England with his wife, author and illustrator Kelly
Murphy.

Nancy Skolos (RISD faculty / department head,
Graphic Design) works in tandem with her husband
Tom Wedell (senior critic, RISD) to diminish
the boundaries between graphic design and
photography, creating collaged three-dimensional
images influenced by cubism, technology, and
architecture.

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Wilhelm Robart
Dutch, active 1770s
Trompe I’Oeil, 1770s

Pen and ink, brush and wash, watercolor,

and chalk on paper

Sheet: 39.1 x 36 cm. (15.4 * 14.2 in.)

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Barnet Fain 2001.93.2

Issue

Manual Spring 2014

Table of Contents

8

10

18

20

35

52

56

(cover)

Hugo Laubi
Swiss, 1888-1959
Cafe Odeon (detail), 1920
Color lithograph on paper
Image: 122.2 * 87.6 cm.

(48 Vs x 3434 in.)

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Rowland Hazard
26.134

From the Files

The beginning of a collection

Kate Irvin
Double Takes

Stela ofHeni

James P. Allen & Antoine Revoy

For the Voice

Jan Howard & Nancy Skolos
Artist on Art

Manual Text

Cyrus Highsmith
Object Lesson

“To my friend”

Hyacinthe Aubry-Lecomte’s Madame Recamier (1827)
Daniel Harkett

Portfolio

Loose links &
clear couplings

Artist on Art

The Museum as Flea Market

Kenneth Goldsmith
How To

The making of a movement

Alison W. Chang

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tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam,
quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo
consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum
dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident,
sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

9

Lorem ipsum, the standard placeholder text used by designers and printers,
isn’t really Latin. Mangled over centuries of use, it plays at being Latin. The
opening phrase, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, comes from Cicero’s philosophical
treatise On the ends of good and evil (45 BCE). As a whole, the passage has
become meaningless and untranslatable, and yet it is highly useful in that in
its incomprehensibility, it occupies space. Legend has it that this pseudo-Latin
passage was the creation of a 15th-century printer who wished to mock up
a sheet of moveable type. Over the centuries and across many inventions and
innovations in type and printing, this incoherent sequence of letters, words,
and sentences has acted as a space filler and form shaper in conventional
printing, desktop publishing, and electronic typesetting.

In potently meaningful and deliberately meaningless ways, this issue of Manual
celebrates text. Join us as we read and read into calls to action, incantations,
prayers, portrayals, missives, notes, proclamations, and musings.

Columns

From the Files pries open the archive, Double Take looks at one object two
different ways, Artist on Art offers a creative response by an invited artist,
Object Lesson exposes the stories behind objects, Portfolio presents a series
of objects on a theme, How To explores the making of an object

Issue

Manual Spring 2014

Lorem Ipsum

Object: Japanese Buddhist Monk’s

Stole, 1662-1722

Materials: Silk and gold-wrapped yarn

compound weave, pieced

Dimensions: 134.6 x 29.8 cm.

(53 x 11% in . )

Acquisition: Bequest of Miss Lucy T.

Aldrich 55.440

The sales receipt at right bears the fluid cursive script,
signature, personal seal, and kimono-shaped trademark
of the respected Kyoto-based textile dealer Shojiro
Nomura. A memento from the first of many voyages made
to Asia between 1919 and 1929 by Rhode Island native
Lucy Truman Aldrich (1869-1955), this folio— dated
September 12, 1919— itemizes her purchase of a wrapping
cloth ( fukusa ) and stole (oh/) worn by a Buddhist monk.
The ohi’s complex pattern in silk and gold features
dragons, peaches (suggesting longevity), and cloud forms
depicted in a Chinese style (detail above).

From the Files

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On this first trip, Aldrich, the daughter of Senator Nelson
Aldrich and the sister of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, cruised
via Vancouver to Japan, Korea, and China, where she
commenced her collecting career with a flourish and
cultivated what became a lifelong appreciation for the
finest examples of textile artistry. She purchased the first
of many hundreds of pieces, 700 of which she gave to the
RISD Museum, forming the nucleus of its renowned Asian
textile collection. Immediately upon Aldrich’s return to
Rhode Island, the museum exhibited her finds, and ever
since, rotations of textiles donated by Aldrich have almost
continuously been on view.

Receipt from S. Nomura, Kyoto,
to Lucy T ruman Aldrich

Kate Irvin

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Manual Spring 2014

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James P. Allen: This stela, or gravestone, comes
from the cemetery at Naga ed-Deir in Upper Egypt,
about 65 miles north of modern Luxor. The area
was an important provincial center during the first
millennium of Egypt’s history, from about 3000 to
2000 BCE, and particularly during the period of the
stela’s creation, when Egypt was ruled from a capital
at Herakleopolis some 200 miles farther north.

During the Herakleopolitan Period, provincial
control was stronger than that exercised from the
capital, and this is reflected in the emergence of

local art styles in place of that which had dominated
in the preceding era of the Old Kingdom, centered
at Memphis (just south of modern Cairo). Heni’s
stela is a particularly fine example of the style that
characterized Upper Egyptian art in his lifetime. It
retains much of the formality of the Old Kingdom
style but is enlivened by the high relief in the figure
and in the treatment of the face.

Like most Egyptian art, the stela favors the
symbolic over the realistic. This preference can be
seen in the features of Heni’s face, shown frontally
on a side profile of the head; in his left hand, which

Egyptian, from Naga ed-Deir

Funerary stela of Heni, 2150-2134 BCE

Limestone and paint

48.9 x 68.6 cm. (19% * 27 in.)

Museum Appropriation Fund

and Mary B. Jackson Fund 38.208

Take

Double

James P. Allen /
Antoine Revoy

is placed in front of the staff it holds; and in his feet,
both of which are shown as a left foot in profile.
Heni’s staff and baton identify him as a local official,
and his pelt is that worn by such officials when
serving as a priest.

In front of Heni is an altar, painted to imitate
granite, on which are six highly stylized loaves of
bread. To the right are piles of offerings, including
onions and a shank of beef stacked on a table; more
vegetables and tall loaves of bread over a goose;
two jars of beer, topped by a basket with more cuts
of meat; and finally, more bread, vegetables, a bird,
and meat. These represent the kinds of offerings
that Heni hoped to have presented at his tomb daily,
so that his spirit could benefit from the nourishment
they contained.

The rest of the stela is occupied by several lines
of hieroglyphs. The three largest read as follows:

(1) A royal offering of Anubis atop his mountain
and in wrappings, lord of the sacred land,

(2) in all his good places: a good invocation
offering for

(3) the high official, courtier, worthy Heni.

This inscription identifies the stela as authorized
by the king and the god of the local cemetery,

Anubis, guardian of the cemetery (“sacred land”) and
patron of embalmers (“in [his] wrappings”), shown
as a jackal perched on a shrine (“his mountain”). The

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60

“invocation” was a summons to Heni’s spirit issued
each time an offering was made. In the last line, Heni
has two titles linking him to the royal court; “worthy”
refers to his right to receive daily offerings.

The fourth line specifies “a thousand of bread,
a thousand of beer, a thousand of fowl, a thousand
of beef, a thousand of everything good for the high
official, royal sealer, worthy Heni.” The additional
title “royal sealer” refers to Heni’s control of goods
coming from, or destined for, the king’s estate.

The final line identifies Heni as “beloved of his
father, blessed by his mother, and ruler of their
house.” The last epithet, which is highly unusual,
probably indicates that Heni controlled the estate
of his father and mother after their death. Since
Heni’s titles only reflect his association with the
Herakleopolitan court, it is impossible to say what
functions he exercised in the local community, other
than the priestly role indicated by his leopard skin,
which was an occasional duty of officials rather than
a profession.

Heni’s stela was meant to be seen by visitors to
his tomb, to encourage them to leave offerings for
his spirit. Visitors to the stela in the RISD Museum
cannot leave such offerings, but as other such stelae
request, “If there is nothing in your hand, you should
say, A thousand of everything good for the spirit of
the owner.’”

Issue

Manual Spring 2014

Lorem Ipsum

Egyptian, from Naga ed-Deir

Funerary stela of Heni (detail), 2150-2134 BCE

Limestone and paint

48.9 x 68.6 cm (19% x 27 in.)

Museum Appropriation Fund

38.208

James P. Allen /
Antoine Revoy

Take

Antoine Revoy: To encounter the Heni stela is to
participate in a tripartite meeting in which the viewer
not only makes the acquaintance of the deceased
Egyptian official Heni, but also of the nameless
artist who carved this tablet commemorating him.

As an illustrator, I delve into a variety of narrative
art forms— manga, comics, and animation— and
as a designer much of my work has to do with the
juxtaposition of image with type or the relationship
between art and text. When I came upon the Heni
stela, I experienced a profound emotional connection
to someone working with identical elements and
toiling under similar constraints. To meet this fellow
artist from 4,000 years ago, and to witness how he
dealt with the same pictorial challenges, beautifully
arranging image and word in a medium both lasting
and difficult to work with, is intensely affecting.

An Egyptian funerary stela typically marks the
location of a burial ground and supplies information
regarding the identity and nature of the deceased.
The task of its sculptor, much like that of today’s
visual artist or designer, was to manipulate this
content to achieve the objectives of communication
and invocation. Though Heni’s stela is now in
Providence, Rhode Island, far away from its original
setting, we can nevertheless still appreciate the care
with which it was devised and crafted. While Heni is
engraved on the left of the stone slab using ancient
Egypt’s customary composite perspective, the
remaining two-thirds of the stela’s surface, on the
right, are organized in horizontal registers. These
different levels subdivide hieroglyphics in sections

akin to the columns, rows, or lines in modern texts.

A balanced and elegant solution, the asymmetrical
design structures illustration (Heni embodies his
trade, wearing an animal skin and curled wig and
holding a priest’s wand or staff), information (Heni’s
name and title are documented, in homage and
commemoration), and spiritual effect (kindly wishes
and symbolic offerings for the afterlife are presented
by family members or friends).

When contemplating art, I find a singular joy in
seeing the things the artist— independent from his
or her primary motives— unwittingly left for us to
discover, such as the carving marks on this work,
which allow me to relate to their maker. As I close
in to carefully inspect individual scratches, I follow
their separate or collective motions and consider
their subtle depths. This opportunity conveys a
sense of the hands that moved across and against
the limestone, patiently and expertly carving it,
refining its form and giving it meaning. The stela’s
metaphysical subject matter and its preoccupation
with the transition from life to death confer to the
object the properties of a memento mori, as its
anonymous sculptor calls upon us through millennia
to reflect on humanity’s timeless mysteries.

Double Take

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Double Take

El Lissitzky, designer,

Russian, 1890-1941

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, poet,
Russian, 1893-1930

R.S.F.S.R. State Publishing House, Moscow-Berlin
For the Voice (Dlia golosa), 1923
Letterpress text and illustrations
19.1 x 13.3 x .64 cm. (JVi x 5% x % in.)

Mary B. Jackson Fund 2006.92.1
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Take

Double

Jan Howard /
Nancy Skolos

Jan Howard: For the Voice , a small volume of poems
by Vladimir Mayakovsky designed and illustrated
by El Lissitzky, has made a huge impression on
artists and designers since its publication in 1923.

Its modest size— 7 Vi by 5% by Vi inches— is
consistent with a number of Russian Futurist books
of poetry created in the 1910s, but its style is as
revolutionary as its text. While the earlier books,
striking in their own right, were very much hand-
made, primarily with expressively drawn lithographic
illustration, collage elements, and pages often
stapled together, For the Voice is an industrial
production. The book’s aesthetic is in keeping with
the celebration of technology as a liberating force
in creating a utopian socialist society following the
1917 Russian Revolution.

The title, For the Voice , reflects the book’s
intended use— for recitation. Most of the poems
are in support of the Revolution, addressing sailors,
soldiers, workers, and artists of all types. The book’s
small size made it ideal to carry into factories, clubs,
or assembly halls— where Mayakovsky famously took
his poetry. A tabbed index, like that more typically
found in an address book, quickly identifies the
location of each poem with an abbreviated title and
related symbol so that one could easily find a poem
specific to an audience. It is an exciting concept for a
book of fiery verse, and Lissitzky’s spirited graphics
further incite a passionate performance.

One of the 13 poems included, “Order No. 2 to
the Arts Armies,” discourages the traditional work

17

of artists and instead pleas for master craftsmen,
engineers, and mechanics to take up the charge
to build a new visual language for a new society—
a role that Lissitzky embraced. He referred to
himself on the title page as a “book constructor”
rather than an artist or illustrator. His dynamic
visual accompaniment to the poems uses only the
elements found within a typesetter’s case— letters
of various sizes and direction, punctuation marks,
bars, rules, and so on. With them, he— or rather
a Berlin typesetter under his direction— built titles,
recognizable images (such as a ship, hammer and
sickle, a figure), and emotive signs. Nowhere is
Lissitzky’s hand in evidence.

The cover, one of the simplest designs of the
book, is expressive of Lissitzky’s precise yet charged
imagery. Mayakovsky’s name is in black, boldly
displayed horizontally along the center with an
oversized M constructed of bars. Flowing vertically
from the interior of the M is the title in a red bar,
with words reading both vertically and horizontally,
giving notice from the start of the active nature
of the book. A red-banded circle outlined in black
echoes a drawing in the first pages of the book that
more clearly references the eye; it also suggests an
open mouth or perhaps a megaphone, conflating the
visual and the verbal. Three short black diagonal
lines evoke reverberation. The black and red scheme
is dissonant against the bright orange background.
Lissitzky’s design amplified Mayakovsky’s strident
call for participation in a revolutionary society.

Issue

Manual Spring 2014

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Double Take

C0JtHU£

Manual Spring 2014

Lorem Ipsum

El Lissitzky, designer,

Russian, 1890-1941

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, poet,

Russian, 1893-1930

R.S.F.S.R. State_Publishing House, Moscow-Berlin
01 ia golosa), 1923
|t andJilwqfc r ations

WA x K in.)
i 2006.92.1

^ty cars). New ^iH Howard /
Nancy Skolos

Nancy Skolos

For the Voice: 13 thoughts
on a book of 13 poems

Spirit— 7.5 by 5.25 by .25 inches in size, with only
64 pages and 13 poems, For the Voice has a sparkling
and larger-than-life aura.

It’s truly interdisciplinary— a collaboration
between the playwright, poet, and actor Vladimir
Mayakovsky and the architect, painter, and
typographer El Lissitzky.

Mayakovsky: playwright + poet + actor =
audience participation. The poems, which were
often read aloud, transformed political rallies
into performance art.

Lissitzky: architect + painter + typographer =
a new, built structure for reading. His way of

designing a poem on a page broke away from
conventional book design to form an integrated
visual/verbal experience. 1

Complexity is communicated simply— Mayakovsky’s
writing style was forceful yet ironic, with word play
and double entendre that expressed the intricacy
of the political conflict by engaging the reader/
listener with illuminating metaphors. “His rhythm is
the rhythm of argument, the rhythm of an orator’s
address, . . . the rhythm of a march.” 2

something you don’t expect to see in a poetry
book. These were employed by Lissitzky to
organize this compendium of Mayakovsky’s most
popular revolutionary poems, and to facilitate
easy access during public speeches.

Technical finesse— Lissitzky collaborated with
a letterpress printer to push the process beyond
work-a-day utility. The poems were typeset in
dramatically contrasting sizes and fonts, and the
“furniture” usually used to make space between
lines and columns of type was reconfigured to
make pictorial elements.

Graphic language— By limiting the means to
letterpress printing and its component machine-
made elements, Lissitzky invented a graphic
language. 3 Lissitzky explained, “The book is
created with the resources of the compositor’s
type-case alone. The possibilities of two-color
printing (overlays, cross-hatching, and so on)
have been exploited to the full.” 4

Opposing forces— For the Voice (1923) builds on
Lissitzky’s bold use of contrast— round/square, red/
black, and large/small to construct emotional and
symbolic impact. This is also evident in his works
immediately preceding, Beat the Whites with the Red
Wedge (1920) and Story of Two Squares (1922).

1. Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-
Nagy, 7977-7946 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997), 39.

Double Take

Designer as poet— Lissitzky’s Constructivist
vocabulary heightened Mayakovsky’s inventive
poetic structures. For example, in the opening
title spread for the poem “Left March,” the word
march is located in the upper left corner and
repeated with zigzag lines, as if marching in
formation. On the right page, the word appears
again on the left stem of the large red capital M.

Technology is intrinsic to expression— Because
of its mechanical output and its power for mass
dissemination, the use of machine printing further
connoted the ideals of the Revolution. All of
this added up to a holistic book production that
reflected the content of the poems and the
intensity of the time.

2. Juliette Stapanian-Apkarian, “Modernist ‘Vision’ in the Poems of
Mayakovsky,” in Voices of the Revolution: Collected Essays, ed. Patricia Railing
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 76.

A seminal moment— For the Voice reminds us how
much of our current design principles were born
out of the Constructivist movement. This is an
influential piece in the history of graphic design
because its marriage of abstraction and mechanical
technique set up a new structural framework for
the text and image.

A parallel universe— For the Voice raises questions
about what the equivalent visual expression of
today’s technology might be, and shows that a
corresponding measure of passion and purpose may
also be essential.

3. Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish, Graphic Design History,

A Critical Guide, 2nd ed. (Pearson Education, Inc., 2013), 183.

4. Martha Scotford, “Notes on the Visual Translation of For the Voice” in
Voices of the Revolution: Collected Essays, ed. Patricia Railing (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2000), 45.

Issue

Artist on Art

Issue

Spring 2014

t

1

Object Lesson

“To my friend”

Hyacinthe Aubry-Lecomte’s Madame
Recamier (1827)

Daniel Harkett

25

A gem in the RISD Museum’s collection is an unassuming
print that depicts a woman, seated on a chaise longue, reading
a book in her apartment [Fig. 2]. It is an image that suggests
the joys of solitude, the pleasures of quiet absorption in
familiar surroundings. But it’s also an object that speaks
aloud — through its iconography, texts, and material history —
of friendships and intersecting social networks.

As the penciled inscription by the printmalcer tells us, the
work portrays Madame Recamier, one of the most well-known
women in early 19th-century France [Fig. 1]. Recamier first
came to prominence as a tastemalcer and celebrity in the glitzy
social world of late 1790s and early 1800s Paris, where she
maintained a salon in a sumptuously decorated townhouse in
the fashionable district of the Chaussee d’Antin. 1 By the 1820s,
however, Recamier’ s fortune had changed dramatically.

FIG. 1 (detail) & 2

Hyacinthe-Louis-Victor-Jean-Baptiste Aubry-Lecomte
French, 1797-1858

After Francois-Louis Hardy Dejuinne
French, 1784-1844
Madame Recamier, 1827
Lithograph and chine colle on paper
Image: 39.9 * 47.8 cm. (15 % * 18 13 /ie in.)

Mary B. Jackson Fund 76.034

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Object Lesson

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Following a financial collapse in the wake of some disastrous speculative
activity by her banker husband, Recamier separated from him and,
in 1819, moved into the convent of l’Abbaye-aux-Bois. Located in the
“tranquil and airy” Paris neighborhood of the Faubourg Saint-Germain,
the convent had a history of taking in upper-class women who found
themselves in difficult circumstances. 2 It is in her apartment there that
we find Recamier in Aubry-Lecomte’s print.

Despite the image’s suggestion of solitude, Recamier’s life at
1 ’Abbaye-aux-Bois was intensely social. 3 Shortly after her arrival, she
reopened her salon, which became a meeting place for a wide range of
elite political and cultural figures until her death in 1849. The salon was
known as a place where people with different opinions could interact,
encouraging cohesion during a fractious period in French history. 4
Friendship was the code that underpinned this sociable activity; when
the Russian writer Alexander Turgenev visited Recamier’s salon in 1839,
Recamier showed him a room of portraits and other mementos that he
then called her “museum of friendship.” 5

Chief among Recamier’s objects at l’Abbaye-aux-Bois was a painting
by the artist Francois Gerard depicting a scene from Madame de Stael’s
novel Corinne (1807), in which the eponymous heroine improvises poetry
in an outdoor setting redolent of a salon [Fig. 3]. 6 A friend and mentor
of Recamier, Stael imagined Corinne as a metaphor for the connective
potential of salon culture. Through her performances of poetry, Corinne
created experiences that joined her listeners in intimate fellowship. She
was, as another character in the novel puts it, “the bond that unites her
friends.” 7 At l’Abbaye-aux-Bois, Gerard’s painting of Corinne materialized
the poet’s presence as a guiding light for Recamier’s salon. In the Aubry-
Lecomte print, the painting can be seen on the wall on the left of the
image, with the identification of Recamier with Corinne suggested by the
mirroring of the two figures.

The rich history of Gerard’s painting added meaning to Recamier’s
salon as well. The work was commissioned jointly in 1818 by Recamier
and her former lover Prince August of Prussia to act as a memorial to their
friendship with Madame de Stael, who had died a year earlier. 8 After the
commission was complete, Prince August, who had paid for the painting,
gave it to Recamier as a sign of their close relationship. Having met and
pursued an affair while staying at Stael’s Swiss estate of Coppet in 1807,
the pair subsequently entered into a long friendship sustained by a

Object Lesson

FIG. 3

Franajis Gerard,

French, 1770-1837

Corinne at Cape Miseno, 1819-1820

Oil on canvas

Musee des Beaux-Arts de Lyon
© Lyon MBA / Photo Alain Basset

sequence of gift exchanges. 9 After leaving Coppet, Recamier seems to have
given August a miniature portrait of herself. This was later followed by the
gift of Corinne to Recamier, who responded by sending August the original
portrait on which the miniature was based, Gerard’s Madame Recamier
(1805; Paris, Musee Carnavalet). The presence of Gerard’s Corinne in the
room Recamier used for her salon thus interwove memories of intimacy
with the statement of Recamier’s identity as a salonniere.

29

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Object Lesson

The RISD Museum’s print intersects with this complex history
of objects and social relations. August appears to have requested
another portrait of Recamier, which was painted in 1826 by Francois-
Louis Dejuinne [Fig. 4]. 10 After the completed painting was exhibited
in Paris, it was probably sent to the prince in Berlin. 11 Aubry-Lecomte’s
lithograph was then likely commissioned by Recamier to offset the
loss of the painting, an indication of the value she attached to it. The
print also seems to have been used actively by Recamier to sustain
friendships beyond that with August, and with them her social network.

A biographer of Aubiy-Lecomte, Edmond Caillette de L’Hervilliers,
indicates that the print was not made for the public but to be “given to 31

a few friends.” 12 Other evidence suggests that the print was put on sale, ^

and it was discussed publicly in the newspaper Le Mentor at the time of 60
its completion. 13 Nevertheless, Caillette de L’Hervilliers’s suggestion is
consistent with what we know about the way Recamier used the objects in
her salon to build relationships.

One of those relationships was with the printmaker himself. 14 Born
in Nice in 1797, Hyacinthe Aubiy-Lecomte came to Paris in 1816 to take
up an administrative position in the finance ministry. 15 Obliged to do so to
pay the bills, Aubiy-Lecomte also had artistic ambitions that he pursued
by attending evening classes in drawing at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. 16
He seems to have done well, attracting the attention and support of the
established artist Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson. In 1819 Girodet
introduced Aubry-Lecomte to the relatively new process of lithography,
with life-changing consequences. 17 Over the course of the following
decade, Aubiy-Lecomte emerged as the preeminent producer of fine-art
reproductive lithography in France. 18 At a time when the technology was
often associated with low-end print production, he combined certain line-
engraving conventions with soft tonal effects to create a highly regarded
style similar to Girodet’s own brand of classicism, which made extensive
use of chiaroscuro.

In the mid-1820s, Francois Gerard introduced Aubiy-Lecomte
to Recamier, and the printmaker attended Recamier’s salon. 19 Soon
afterwards, Aubiy-Lecomte began a project to reproduce Gerard’s
Corinne , which resulted in two full reproductions and two prints of

FIG. 4

Francois-Louis Hardy Dejuinne
French, 1786-1844
Madame Recamier, 1826
Oil on canvas
34 x 47 cm. (13.4 * 18.5 in.)
Louvre, Paris, France
Photo Jean-Gilles Berizzi

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details. 20 When Recamier chose Aubry-Lecomte to lithograph the
Dejuinne portrait, then, she selected someone who had become part
of her extended circle. The handwritten title on the RISD Museum’s
print, which names it as “Madame Recamier,” invites the viewer to
join this intimate group. Although the woman on the chaise longue
would have been instantly recognizable to many in Paris in the 19th
century, the publicly circulated title of the lithograph was the generic
“Interior.” 21 Aubry-Lecomte ’s inscribed “Madame Recamier” is a
personal introduction to the interior’s inhabitant.

At the same time that Aubry-Lecomte ’s print linked him to
Recamier’s social circle, it strengthened his relationship to another
group defined by the printed text beneath the image [Fig. 5]. On the right
we find “Lithog. par Aubry-Lecomte, 1827” [Lithographed by Aubry-
Lecomte, 1827]. On the left is the name “Dejuinne,” indicating the
painter of the work on which Aubry-Lecomte’ s print is based. Dejuinne,
like Aubry-Lecomte, was a student of Girodet, who encouraged a
particularly strong sense of community among his students, in part by
engaging them in collaborative projects to reproduce his work. 22 After
Girodet’s death in 1824, his students maintained their community by
continuing this practice. Harvard’s Houghton Library holds a copy of one
of their publications, The Loves of the Gods (1825-1826), which contains
lithographs made after a group of Girodet’s drawings. 23 Dejuinne and

Object Lesson

pot

Aubiy-Lecomte both contributed prints to that volume. Aubiy-
Lecomte’s print after Dejuinne’s painting of Recamier can be
understood similarly as a shared project that perpetuated the
fraternal culture of their master’s studio.

At the bottom of the RISD Museum’s print is the name and
address of the printer of the lithograph, [Francois Le] Villain. An
early supporter of Aubiy-Lecomte, Villain had turned up on his
doorstep in 1821 full of praise for the lithographer’s first group of
published prints, which represented details from Girodet’s Ossian
Receiving the Spirits of the French Heroes (1802; Rueil-Malmaison,
Musee National du Chateau), and with a suggestion for a new
project they could work on together. 24 The print bears witness
to this ongoing relationship between lithographer and printer,
which Aubiy-Lecomte also linked to their mutual acquaintance
with one of the pioneers of lithography in France, the Comte
de Lasteyrie. 25 The simple printed text at the bottom of this
lithograph — three names and their roles indicated in abbreviated ways —
thus speaks not merely of the facts surrounding the work’s creation, but
also of a tight-knit community of painters, printmakers, and printers in
Paris in the 1820s, a group joined by enthusiasms held in common as well
as shared educational experiences and commercial interests.

Much of what I have argued so far could be said of any of the prints
in the edition that Villain made of Aubiy-Lecomte ’s lithograph. But
there is a further element linking the object to social relationships that
is unique to RISD’s print: the elegant, handwritten dedication by the
printmaker. It reads: “A mon ami le Docteur B[ar]on H. Larrey, Aubry
Lecomte” [“To my friend ...”].

What are we to make of this? We know that Aubry-Lecomte, like many
printmakers then and since, liked to give examples of his work to friends
and family. In his correspondence, he notes his intentions to pass on
examples of this print to his father-in-law and, perhaps recognizing and
enacting the print’s potential to act as a model of virtuous femininity,

33

60

FIG. 5 (detail)

Hyacinthe-Louis-Victor-Jean-Baptiste Aubry-Lecomte
French, 1757-1858

After Francois-Louis Hardy Dejuinne
French, 1784-1844
Madame Recamier, 1827
Lithograph and chine colle on paper
Image: 39.9 * 47.8 cm. (15 % * 18 13 /ie in.)

Mary B. Jackson Fund 76.034

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his sister. 26 The RISD print is dedicated to Baron Felix Hippolyte Larrey
(1808-1895), a member of a family with whom Aubry-Lecomte had
important connections [Fig. 6]. 27 Hippolyte’s mother, Elisabeth, trained
to be an artist in the studio of Jacques-Louis David at
the same time as Girodet, with whom she maintained a
friendship. 28 According to Aubry-Lecomte’ s 19th-century
biographers, it was Elisabeth who was responsible
for the printmaker’s most significant professional
connection: his introduction to Girodet. 29 In the
Houghton Library volume, which likely belonged to the
Larrey family, a group of drawings that former RISD
curator Clare Rogan has attributed to Elisabeth has been
added to the lithographs. Rogan suggests that these
drawings, which are copies of the prints by Girodet’s
students after Girodet’s own drawings, represent an
attempt by Elisabeth to connect herself to a community
of artists that traced its lineage ultimately to David. 30
Two of the drawings, which reproduce Aubry-Lecomte ’s
contributions to the volume, could represent a particular
acknowledgment of the bond between Elisabeth and the
lithographer whose career she had supported at a crucial
moment [Fig. 7].

Hippolyte’s father was Dominique-Jean Larrey,
surgeon-in-chief to Napoleon’s army, Girodet’s friend
and doctor, and, it would seem, doctor to Aubry-
Lecomte’s own family. In one letter, written in 1824,
Aubry-Lecomte said that Larrey had helped save the life
of his young son, Charles, by treating him for a “terrible croup.” 31 Several
years later, Aubry-Lecomte ’s wife Gabrielle reported that Larrey had
examined the boy’s head and, applying period ideas about physiognomy,
determined that the bump indicating an aptitude for the “mechanical
arts” was “strongly pronounced.” 32 These anecdotes, along with the role
played by Elisabeth Larrey in Aubry-Lecomte ’s career, speak of significant
ties between the two families — ties reiterated by the inscription on
RISD’s print. This text is an acknowledgment by a grateful artist of
a debt to a mentor, via her son, with whom he had also developed a
friendship. It is the gesture of a father who dedicates a print to the son
of a friend, who had saved his own son’s life. Given that Hippolyte would
have acquired “Baron,” the title included in the inscription, only after

6

FIG. 6

E. Decazy, printmaker
Hippolyte Larrey, 1842
Lithograph

Bibliotheque de I’Academie
nationale de Medecine

Object Lesson

FIG. 7

Attributed to Elisabeth Larrey

French, 1770-1842

After Aubry-Lecomte

French, 1797-1858

After Girodet

French, 1767-1824

Pan Pursuing Syrinx, undated

Brown ink over graphite on paper

pf *54C-508, Houghton Library,

Harvard University

7

the death of his father in 1842, merely three days after the death of his
mother, the inscribed lithograph can be imagined as a commemorative
object. Already many years old when Aubry-Lecomte gave it to his friend,
the print likely recalled shared memories of familial interaction while
strengthening their present relationship.

At first glance, Aubry-Lecomte ’s vision of Madame Recamier “en
meditation in her library, far from the turmoil of the world,” 33 suggests
isolation. Further examination of the print and the context in which
it was made reveals, however, that it was deeply embedded in social
relations. The image was used by Recamier herself to maintain her
extensive mixed-gender social circle; the work’s printed text linked
painters, a lithographer, and a publisher in a male-dominated network
typical of the period’s professional artistic culture; and the penciled
dedication on RISD’s copy joined the histories of two families. A catalyst
of connection, the print is not so much “of” somebody, but always “to.”

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The author would like to thank Stephen Bann, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Sarah
Horowitz, Benedict Leca, Amy Pickworth, and Tanya Sheehan for their help
during the writing of this essay.

1 The bibliography on Recamier is extensive. A useful starting point is Stephane
Paccoud, ed., Juliette Recamier, muse et mecene, exhibition catalogue, Musee
des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (Paris: Hazan, 2009).

2 Gaiignani’s New Paris Guide (Paris and London, 1824), 27. For a history of
IAbbaye-aux-Bois, including an account of Recamier’s residence there, see
Lucien Lambeau, "LAbbaye-aux-Bois de Paris (1638-1906),” in Proces-Verbaux,
Commission du Vieux-Paris, Annee 1905 (Paris, 1906), 237-315.

3 For a longer discussion of Recamier’s salon at I’Abbaye-aux-Bois and her use
of images to mark out a productive space between private and public spheres,
see Daniel Harkett, "Mediating Private and Public: Juliette Recamier’s Salon at
L’Abbaye-aux-Bois,” in Women, Femininity, and Public Space in European Visual
Culture, 1789-1914, ed. Temma Balducci and Heather Belnap Jensen (Farnham,
U.K.: Ashgate, forthcoming).

4 For extensive descriptions of Recamier’s salon, see Etienne Delecluze,
Souvenirs de soixante annees (Paris, 1862).

5 Quoted in Anne Dion-Tenenbaum, "Le mobilier Recamier,” in Juliette Recamier,
ed. Paccoud, 181.

6 Patrick H. Vincent, The Romantic Poetess: European Culture, Politics and
Gender, 1820-1840 (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2004), xxi.

7 Madame de Stael, Corinne or Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 27.

8 Prince August of Prussia to Francois Gerard, 28 September 1818, Monique Ray,
Madame Recamier (Lyon: Musee historique de Lyon, 1977), 54.

9 For the details of these exchanges, see the catalogue entry for Gerard’s
portrait of Recamier in Paccoud, Juliette Recamier, 76-77.

10 For more commentary on Dejuinne’s painting, see Harkett, "Mediating Private
and Public”; and Paccoud, Juliette Recamier, 88-89.

11 The painting was shown at the exhibition supporting the cause of Greek
independence that took place in the Galerie Lebrun in Paris in the summer of
1826. For a discussion of where the painting went after it was completed, see
Paccoud, Juliette Recamier, 89.

12 Edmond Caillette de L’Hervilliers, "Aubry-Lecomte et les origines de la
lithographie en France,” in Compiegne, sa foret, ses alentours
(Compiegne, 1869), 410.

13 According to Le Mentor, the print was on sale "chez MM. Noel et fils, galerie
Colbert.” "Un interieur,” Le Mentor, (3 November 1827): 3. Bibliographie de France
(22 December 1827, 1059) lists two versions of the print for sale: one avant la
lettre for 24 francs; the other avec la lettre for 12 francs.

14 The most substantial recent discussion of Aubry-Lecomte is Stephen
Bann, "Is Lithography an Art? Aubry-Lecomte and Lemud,” in Distinguished
Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of Nineteenth-Century (.New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2013), 121-67. Two important 19th-century accounts of his life
and works are: Caillette de L’Hervilliers, "Aubry-Lecomte”; and Auguste Galimard,
Les Grands Artistes contemporains: Aubry-Lecomte (Paris, 1860).

15 Caillette de L’Hervilliers, "Aubry-Lecomte,” 370.

16 Ibid., 371.

17 Ibid., 375.

18 For an extended account of Aubry-Lecomte’s role in debates about
lithography’s status as a fine-art medium, see Bann, "Is Lithography an Art?”

See also, Clare I. Rogan, "Drawing Lithography: Originality and the Graphic
Sign in France and England, 1798-1830," in Touchstone: 200 Years of Artists'
Lithographs, exhibition catalogue (Cambridge: Harvard University Art Museums,
1998), 56.

19 Caillette de L’Hervilliers, "Aubry-Lecomte,” 409.

20 On these copies see, Bann, "Is Lithography an Art?” 142-44; Harkett,
"Mediating Private and Public"; and Paccoud, Juliette Recamier, 232-36.

21 Bibliographie de France (22 December 1827, 1059) gives the title of the print
as "Interieur.” The title of Le Mentor’s article on the print is "Un interieur” (3
November 1827, 2).

22 Bann, "Is Lithography an Art?,” 132.

23 On the Houghton volume, see Clare Rogan, " A Common Patrimony’: Drawing
Girodet’s Legacy,” in Dear Print Fan: A Festschrift for Marjorie B. Cohn, ed.
Craigen Bowen, Susan Dackerman, and Elizabeth Mansfield (Cambridge: Harvard
University Art Museums, 2001), 275-80..

24 Caillette de L’Hervilliers, "Aubry-Lecomte," 392-93.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 412.

27 The print likely remained in Hippolyte’s possession until he died in 1895. In
1897 it was purchased by the Providence art collector Joseph C. Ely from the
New York print dealer Max Williams. It later passed from the Ely family to the
Providence Athenaeum, from which it was purchased by the RISD Museum in
1976 (RISD Museum files).

28 Rogan, "A Common Patrimony,” 279.

29 Galimard, "Aubry-Lecomte,” 6; Caillette de L’Hervilliers, "Aubry-Lecomte,” 371.

30 Rogan, "A Common Patrimony,” 279.

31 Caillette de L’Hervilliers, "Aubry-Lecomte,” 400.

32 Ibid., 415.

33 “Un interieur,” Le Mentor (3 November 1827): 2.

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Artist on Art

The Museum as
Flea Market:
Raid the Icebox I with
Andy Warhol

Kenneth Goldsmith

Of all the things known about Andy Warhol— arguably the
world's most famous artist— the fact that he curated a show
called Raid the Icebox that opened at the RISD Museum in
1970 is one of the most obscure. In fact, combing my shelf
of books by and about Warhol (28 in total), I found not a
single mention of it. It's strange, because his life was lived
as a celebrity under the glare of the media, and not a
moment was missed. I should know. In 1994, 1 edited a book
of his collected interviews. It didn't take me long to fill up
the book— few artists were interviewed as frequently as
Warhol— but just when I thought I had uncovered every
interview Warhol ever did, more kept popping up. To this
day, people still tell me about interviews I missed. That’s
the way it was with Warhol: all abundance, all the time. You
simply can’t get to the bottom of it.

So why so little information about this show? And what
were the circumstances surrounding it? And why should
we care today? Back in the '60s, Warhol traveled in wealthy
circles, and his great patrons Jean and Dominique de Menil
had strong connections to the RISD Museum’s young
director, Daniel Robbins. While trying to raise some funds,
Robbins gave the de Menils a tour of the museum’s vast
storage spaces, where they were wowed by the treasures
that were languishing far from the public’s view. Many of
the objects were in poor condition, and they hatched a
fundraising scheme which involved inviting a hip artist into
the storerooms to curate a show. The artist they chose was
Andy Warhol. They had no idea of what they were getting
into. In short, it was a total disaster.

Installation view of Raid the Icebox with Andy Warhol,
RISD Museum, April 23-June30,1970

Warhol treated the museum as if he were on a shopping
spree at a flea market, grabbing everything he could— shoes,
umbrellas, blankets, baskets, chairs, paintings, pottery— and
casually displaying them. The paintings were stacked on top
of each other the way they are in a thrift shop; the antique
shoes were crammed into cabinets, vaguely resembling
Imelda Marcos’s closet; the 19th-century umbrellas were
hung from the ceiling, looking like a cross between a colony
of bats and a surrealist assemblage; gorgeous colonial chairs
were piled up atop each other, like in a cafeteria; colorful
Navajo blankets were stacked on a cheap table, as if they
were in a department store, with the cardboard boxes they
came in shoved underneath. And that’s just the beginning.

The museum’s curatorial staff was offended by what
they perceived to be Warhol’s irreverence in handling their
treasures. They saw his choices as indiscriminately lazy
and his presentation as preposterous. They thought Warhol
truly was the ignoramus his public persona pretended to be.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the exhibition was barraged
by student protestors who— this being the height of the
Vietnam War— found Warhol and his tastes too bourgeois.
During the opening, they paraded through the galleries
carrying signs that read “People over porcelain!” The show
was rarely spoken about again.

Hindsight is 20-20. What was lost on the curators, the
patrons, and the students was the prescience and precision
of Warhol’s act. Over the next 45 years, the art world would
mold itself to Warhol’s vision, celebrating commodities, the
market, and consumer excess. We can frame Warhol’s show
as an early act of institutional critique, a strategy which
later became a powerful and codified art practice. His own
studio work also explored excess: Why make only one Brillo
box when the supermarket has a stack? Why paint only one
portrait of collector Ethel Scull when you can charge her
for 36? To a poor kid from the Pittsburgh slums, more was
always better.

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And more was what they found after his death in
1987. His Upper East Side townhouse was crammed to the
gills with unopened boxes of coats, watches, diamonds,
rugs— you name it— piled up in rooms so stuffed that you
could barely enter them. A year after he died, all of Warhol's
possessions were laid out for all to see on huge tables at
Sotheby's in New York: the whole thing— 10,000 items, from
cookie jars to precious gems— eerily resembled Raid the
Icebox. In what was the largest single collection ever sold at
Sotheby's, Warhol’s trove was viewed by 60,000 people and
auctioned off over the course of 10 days, yielding more than
$25 million. The case has been made for this posthumous
show as Warhol’s final— and in some ways greatest-
exhibition.

But why should we care now? There’s something about
Warhol’s obsessive cataloging and collecting, his archiving
and displaying, that resonates in the digital age. Many of us
raid the digital icebox every day, downloading more cultural
artifacts than we know what to do with. I think it’s fair to say
that most of us have more MP3s sitting on our hard drives
than we’ll ever be able to listen to, and yet we keep acquiring
more, not so different from the way Warhol hoarded cookie
jars or delighted in displaying the dozens of pairs of shoes
he found at the RISD Museum. In some ways, Warhol seems
to be saying that quantity is more important than quality; it
doesn’t matter what you have as long as you have a lot of it.

Installation views of Raid the Icebox with Andy Warhol,
RISD Museum, April 23-June30,1970

Artist on Art

Archiving as a topic of study has gained prominence
in the digital humanities over the past decade. With the rise
of broadband came a flood of artifacts, which prompted
an academic industry dedicated to it. Each year, numerous
conferences are held on the acquisition, preservation, and
display of objects, both analog and digital. But Warhol
got there first. Throughout his career, he made a series of
sculptures that he called Time Capsules. In the corner of
every studio he had sat an open cardboard box into which
any and everything that floated through the Factory was
thrown, from wads of cash to used Kleenex to first pressings
of Rolling Stones records. When a box was filled, he’d seal
it up, number it, and sign it. By the time he died, there were
621 of them, the majority of which remain unopened at the
Warhol Archives in Pittsburgh for the simple fact that it takes

weeks to process one. Each and every object contained
within must be treated as a unique artwork and thus given
proper archival treatment: it is documented, cataloged,
photographed, and numbered, down to the last McDonald’s
wrapper. I was told that cataloging the contents of one box
can take three people a month.

The world we live in, for better or worse, turned out
to be the one that Warhol envisioned. And the world he
imagined was precisely articulated at the RISD Museum
in 1970. As such, one cannot underestimate the historic
importance of his show. Raid the Icebox is a time bomb set
to go off in the near future. Any archivist looking for clues
about how to operate in the digital world would be foolish
not to study what happened here, to see where it all started.

Issue

Manual Spring 2014

Lorem Ipsum

TOGETHER

HAND SIGNALS

SPEAKING

WANT

TO TALK

DIRECT CLARIFY

RESPONSE

POINT OF

ORDER

FEELING

t x

PONT oppose BLOCK
AGREE

HowTo

The making of a movement: Hand Signals is one of 33 posters
assembled into a deluxe print portfolio by Occuprint, a project
dedicated to the poster art of the global Occupy movement.

Although the organizers of Occuprint created this print portfolio
as a fundraiser, they primarily work digitally, maintaining their
website as a storehouse for posters designed by artists all over
the world. In keeping with the ideals of grassroots social protest,

Occuprint encourages users to download posters and distribute
them throughout their communities.

Adopted by Occupy Wall Street organizers, hand signals —
unlike audible signals such as applause, shouts, or booing —
allowed protestors to negotiate a consensus without interrupting
the speaker. Derived from origins as diverse as sign language,

Quaker meetings, the American civil rights movement, and other
protest movements, these hand signals became, via social media,
a lingua franca at other Occupy movement protest locations.

You can download Hand Signals and other Occupy posters at
www.occuprint.org.

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Occupy Together Alison W. Chang

Hand Signals, from portfolio Occuprint, 2012
Color screenprint on paper
Sheet: 45.8 * 30.5 cm. (18 Vie * 12 in.)

Walter H. Kimball Fund 2012.70.1.19

Issue

Manual Spring 2014

Hand in Hand

Portfolio

CO

Roman

Tablet with Greek transcription of letter from
Emperor Hadrian to Common Assembly of
Macedonians, 136-137 CE
Marble

75.3 x 48.3 x 3 cm. (29 5/8 x 19 x 1 3/16 in.)

Mary B. Jackson Fund 1988.060

( 2 )

Abigail Pinniger
American, 1715-1779
Sampler, 1730

Linen plain weave with silk embroidery
40.6 x 24.1 cm. (16x9 1/2 in.)

Gift of Miss Susan B. Thurston 14.060

(3)

Samuel Vernon
American, 1683-1737
Tankard, ca. 1720
Silver

22.2 x 24.8 x 15.2 cm. (8 3/4 x 9 3/4 x 6 in.)

Bequest of Henry Renwick Sedgwick 46.557

(4)

Alexander Girard, designer

American, 1907-1993

Herman Miller Furniture Co., manufacturer

American, 1923-present

Names, 1957

Rayon plain weave, screenprinted

274.3 x 127 cm. (108 x 50 in.)

Jesse Metcalf Fund 1998.43.12
© Girard Studio

(5)

Cy Twombly

American, 1929-2011

Untitled, 1968

Oil and crayon on canvas

200.7 x 261.6 cm. (79 x 103 in.)

Albert Pilavin Memorial Collection of 20th-Century
American Art 69.060
© Cy Twombly Foundation

( 6 )

Ettore Sottsass, Jr., designer
Italian, 1917-2007
Perry A. King, designer
British, b. 1938

Olivetti Manufacturing Company, manufacturer
Italian, 1908-present

Valentine Portable Typewriter and Case, 1969
Plastic, rubber, and metal

10.2 x 32.7 x 32.7 cm. (4 x 12 7/8 x 12 7/8 in.)

Gift of Glenn Gissler 2005.97.2

(7)

French, Rouen

Book of Hours (use of Rouen), ca. 1510
Illuminated manuscript in Latin and French;
miniatures by the Master of the Missal of Ambroise
Le Veneur and borders by Jean Serpin
Ink, tempera, and gold leaf on vellum, bound in
purple velvet over wooden boards

21.3 x 14.3 x 3.2 cm. (8 3/8 x 5 5/8 x 1 3/16 in.)
Museum purchase in honor of Dr. Arnold-Peter
Weiss; Helen M. Danforth Acquisition Fund 2011.30

( 8 )

Erin Rosenthal
American, b. 1976
Jungil Hong
American, b. 1976
Mat Brinkman
American, b. 1973
Brian Chippendale
American, b. 1973
Leif Goldberg
American, b. 1975
Xander Marro
American, b. 1973
Pippi Zornoza
American, b. 1978

Here is a partial list 1995-2005 compiled by a partial
number of people of some “underground" show
spaces, 2006

Collage and pen and ink on paper
44.5 x 66 cm. (17 1/2x26 in.)

Museum purchase: Gift of the Artists’ Development
Fund of the Rhode Island Foundation 2008.17
© Jungil Hong, Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale,
Leif Goldberg, Xander Marro, Pippi Zornoza, Erin
Rosenthal

(9)

Georges Braque
French, 1882-1963
Still Life, 1918
Oil on canvas

46.4 x 72.1 cm. (18 5/16 x 28 3/8 in.)

Mary B. Jackson Fund 48.248

© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /
ADAGP, Paris

( 10 )

Edward Ruscha
American, b. 1937
Raw, 1971

Color screenprint on paper
Sheet: 40.7 x 66 cm. (16 x 26 in.)

Bequest of Richard Brown Baker 2009.92.202
© Ed Ruscha. Courtesy of the artist

(ID

Alejandro Diaz
American, b. 1963

Make Tacos Not War, from the series Povera Lite,
2012

Cast polyurethane resin, acrylic paint, and wood
33 x 45.7 x 2.5 cm. (13 x 18 x 1 in.)

Helen M. Danforth Acquisition Fund 2013.28.2
© Alejandro Diaz

( 12 )

Aaron Siskind
American, 1903-1991
Chicago 32, 1960
Gelatin silver print

Image: 26.7 x 33.8 cm. (10 1/2 x 13 5/16 in.)

Gift of Mr. Richard L. Menschel 77.146.19
Courtesy Aaron Siskind Foundation

(13)

Johann Michael Puchler

German, active ca. 1680-after 1702

Charles III, King of Spain, Archduke of Austria, ca.

1703

Etching and engraving on paper
Sheet: 20 x 8.4 cm. (7 7/8 x 3 5/16 in.)

Jesse Metcalf Fund 2002.53_

(14)

Glenn Ligon
American, b. 1960

Untitled, from the portfolio Runaways, 1993

Lithograph on paper

Sheet: 40.6 x 30.4 cm. (16 x 12 in.)

Mary B. Jackson Fund 2001.32.1.10

Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York,

and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

(15)

Indian, Gujarat region

Leaf from a dispersed Jain manuscript of the
Kalakacharyakatha, 15th— 16th century
Opaque watercolor on paper
Sheet: 11.1 x 26 cm. (4 3/8 x 10 5/16 in.)

Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Maurice H. Shulman and Mr. and
Mrs. Edwin Binney III 60.020.3

(16)

Carl Ostendarp

American, b. 1961

Yaaah, 2009

Acrylic on canvas

83.8 x 96.5 cm. (33 * 38 in.)

Helen M. Danforth Aquisition Fund 2009.37.1

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